Your pick of the coolest Pinewood Derby car at Outdoor Retailer

Update Friday, Aug. 8: And the winner is … the Airhead Tricked Out Car, with 30 percent of the vote! Congrats on your People’s Choice award. We received 2,686 total votes.

Airhead Tricked-Out Car

The original post follows, but voting has now closed.

What happens when you give top outdoor gear manufacturers a Pinewood Derby car kit and tell them to design a car that represents their creative and competitive spirits? We found out this evening at a special Pinewood Derby hosted by the Boy Scouts of America’s Scouting Works team.

Outdoor Retailer is a biannual event in Salt Lake City, Utah, meant to highlight the industry’s best outdoor gear brands. And with 2.7 million members, the BSA helps connect these manufacturers with America’s youth in the outdoors.

But, then again, Scouting’s unofficial purpose is also to bring out the kid in each of us … particularly with tonight’s showdown between 25 custom-designed cars on the track.

The event raised $2,500 for Choose Outdoors, a nonprofit that helps get more youth outdoors in public lands across the U.S. And we’re leaving it up to readers to view photos of each car and vote for their favorite design in the People’s Choice category.

Voting will close at midnight Thursday, Aug. 7; the People’s Choice design winner will be announced here Friday. Click through to view a slideshow of images featuring the 25 Pinewood cars, and vote for your favorite. (You can also find more details on the competition at the link below.)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Tonight’s derby featured two categories of racing: the “classic” division (featuring the same rules used at your son’s Pinewood — cars cannot weigh more than 5 oz.) and the “anything goes” category (so long as it fit on the track, it was OK to race).

Within each category, the fastest cars won a $10,000 media package to the BSA’s magazines (Scouting, Boys’ Life and Eagles’ Call). Other prizes included a Goal Zero Nomad 7 solar panel kit for second place, and third place was awarded a BSA Stag-Horn Handle knife.

Yup, that’s pandering to the expected audience, big time. Of course, so is Benchmade’s sharp pointy thing, but they are at least in-theme, and a beautiful stylistic and technically challenging adaptation.

Wow, I can’t believe Channel IQ is leading the polling at this point (Thurs noon PDT). That’s a very limited interpretation of a fast-wedge design, and not even particularly relevant to outdoor products. The rest of the leaderboard has a set of innovative in-theme car presentations (with some allowance for the StarWars car), and I can see the Pale Morning Media entry getting some joke votes, but really IQ? Someone’s been getting the entire office to vote for their own entry or something.

Browse by Month

RSS

Now on Scoutingmagazine.org

Scouting magazine

Follow Scouting magazine

About

Bryan on Scouting is the official blog of Scouting magazine, a Boy Scouts of America publication. Scouting magazine is published five times a year and is received by 1 million registered adult volunteers.